Web analytics is the practice of measuring, collecting, analyzing and reporting online data for the purposes of understanding how a web site is used by its visitors and how to optimize its usage. Generally, the focus of web analytics is to understand a web site's users, their behavior and activities. The study of online user behavior and activities generates valuable intelligence and provides: performance measures of the website against targets, insights on user behaviors and needs, and how the site is meeting those needs, and optimization ability to make modifications to improve the website based on the results, among other things.
In a typical web analytics scenario, the stakeholder (e.g., web site owner, publisher, advertiser, data aggregator, etc.) has metrics that are required to be captured from a given web site or web property. In one example, a stakeholder may be interested in seeing overall traffic to each page of a web site. In addition, the stakeholder may be interested in knowing the number of clicks to each of several check boxes on a particular web page. Typically, out-of-the-box web analytics tools capture web page information when the page calls for a URL refresh. However, for dynamic activities-such as clicks to check boxes, special accommodations have to be made. For example, the stakeholder's request could require many different custom static variables to be created, with each variable manually configured to capture each check box. Furthermore, changes or additions to web analytics variables for a given web page or web property would necessitate the creation of additional custom variables-leading to an increase in analytics resources required to implement the changes, both from a web analytics instrumentation perspective and a web analytics storage configuration perspective. In addition, these types of web analytics tools have difficulty scaling as web sites and/or analysis requirements change.